April 26

1607 – The colonists of the Virginia Company, chartered by King James 1st of England, makes landfall at Cape Henry at the northeast end of modern day Virginia Beach, Virginia.

1777 – Sybil Ludington, aged 16, daughter of Westchester County, New York Colonel of Militia, Henry Ludington, makes an all night horseback ride over 40 miles to alert militia in the towns of Putnam County, New York, and Danbury, Connecticut, of the approach of British forces.

1805 – During the First Barbary War, a squad of 8 U.S. Marines under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, supported by 500 Arab mercenaries, capture Derna, Cyrenaica in modern day Libya.

1865 – Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead, John Wilkes Booth, in the barn of the farm of Richard H. Garrett, about 2 miles south of Port Royal, Virginia.

1933 – On the day the Gestapo, Geheime Staatspolizei, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established by Hermann Göring, Nazi Germany also issues the Law Against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities limiting the number of Jewish students able to attend public schools and universities.

1945 –Filipino troops of the 66th Infantry Regiment, Philippine Commonwealth Army and troops of USA Forces In the Philippines-Northern Luzon and of the 33rd and 37th Infantry Divisions, U.S Army, are liberated from a prison camp at Baguio, Luzon and return to the fight against the Japanese forces under General Tomoyuki Yamashita.

1954 – The first clinical trials of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine begin in Fairfax County, Virginia.

1956– SS Ideal X, the world’s first successful container ship, leaves Port Newark, New Jersey, for Houston, Texas.

1962 – NASA’s Ranger 4 photographic spacecraft suffers an onboard computer malfunction and crashes into the Moon.

1964 – Tanganyika and the island of Zanzibar merge to form Tanzania.

1981 – Dr. Michael R. Harrison of the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, performs the world’s first human open surgery on a fetus.

1986 – In the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the No. 4 reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant explodes during a reactor test, rupturing the reactor core, causing an open air reactor core fire and releasing airborne radioactive contamination onto part of the Soviet Union and western Europe.

1991 – 55 tornadoes break out across Oklahoma and Kansas killing 21 people, with 17 of those in Andover, Kansas, by the only F5 tornado in the outbreak.

2012 – Indonesia suspends imports of American beef after a confirmed case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy  -“mad cow” disease – was discovered the day before in a dairy cow at the Baker Commodities rendering facility in Hanford, California

2018 – Identified through forensic genetic genealogy comparison on the personal genomics website GEDmatch, the arrest on 24 April of Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. , a former police officer,  as the serial killer “Golden State Killer”, responsible for 12 murders and 50 rapes in California, is announced to the public.